Twice Upon A Time (The Celtic Legends Series) Page 11

  Then Aidan was gone, and the bondswoman, too, and Conor’s hungry kiss pushed away all other thoughts.

  It was ever like this, when Conor first returned home from a journey. Later, later there’d be time for the long, slow loving, for . . . imagination. Right now, all that existed was the simmering heat of his kisses, the swift and hurried yanking of clothes, the throaty laughter truncated in gasps of pleasure as their naked skins finally touched. He lifted her up, and she melted against him.

  That morning, she’d brushed the wolf pelts on their pallet into crackling softness. Now as Conor lowered her upon them, the hairs stood and reached for her. Conor covered her with the whole naked length of him. Her body softened where he grew hard. Her hips tilted with that unspeakable yearning which only abated for brief moments, a yearning she’d reveled in during the long, glorious nights of the months past that they’d spent upon this very bed. He spoke husky, urgent words—harsh words of wanting, of needing—a warrior’s language of love. On the walls around them firelight flared amber and gold.

  His rough hands trailed magic over her limbs. She opened her mouth to him and devoured the scent of fresh air and open woods which clung to his breath. Mist and rain and dew shimmered on his skin, and she dared to trail a path over his jaw with the tip of her tongue, sipping the nectar. How warm he was, driving back the winter chill with the sheer force of his presence. How hard and powerful the thundering of his heart as he sought the welcoming entrance to her body. How he filled her . . . oh . . . the intoxicating tightness, then the throbbing rhythm, the timeless rocking, the ripples of sensation racing over her skin, like the sizzling shock of hot summer rain. And she gripped him, tears pricking the back of her eyes. Sometime during her three-month stay in the ring-fort, Conor had become more than a beloved husband, more than a lover. He’d become her sunshine, her moonlight. Her only taste of freedom.

  For a brief time in his arms, she soared.

  Later, when the fire had died to embers, he rolled his weight off her body and drew her into his arms. She released a long and contented sigh.

  A smug rumble of laughter bubbled in his chest. “I’m glad that I pleased you, lass.”

  “Well it’s best for you that you did.” She settled her head in the niche of his shoulder. “Six days is too long for a man to be going off and leaving his wife.”

  “Is it now?”

  “A queen has nothing else to do but spin and weave and sew.” In this dark little hut, alone, with the cruel whispers of children filtering in through the walls. “A wife gets to thinking of what she’s missing.”

  He caressed her breast lazily. Her nipple peaked in his palm. “Is that complaining I hear coming from your mouth, and you barely three moons wed?”

  “You didn’t marry a complacent little pup. When I stop complaining about your absence, that’s when you should worry.”

  “Is it not enough that they call me spellbound?” Conor traced circles around her tightening, tingling nipple. “Would you have them thinking me as befuddled as a mule?”

  She touched the bristle of his strong, square jaw, uneasy with the edge in his words. “Are you listening to the mutterings of fools now?”

  “It was my intent to raid north to the eastern borders until Samhain, lass. Yet here I am, bounding to my wife’s lap as soon as I came within a half-day’s ride.”

  “It’s glad I am of that.”

  She ran the palm of her hand beneath his chin. He looked up at her from beneath a shock of hair. His easy smile faltered, for that strange, glorious feeling drew taut between them again, as it did whenever they lay together, naked in body and soul. It was a tender emotion born in the fire of passion, nurtured by the fluid of time, blossoming in the sun of their companionship. She knew it as love, for such a river of emotion flowing between two people could be nothing else. And though Conor surrendered to the currents, sometimes she saw in his eyes a certain wariness of this strange magic over which neither he nor she had any control.

  She rasped her nails lightly over his throat. “I’m not letting you leave my bed till Samhain, if I have my way of it.”

  “That is a gift I cannot grant you.” Conor abandoned her breast and traced a line down her abdomen. “The Leinstermen still attack to the east. I came here for the night, no more. Tomorrow morning we ride out again.”

  Her heart sank—low, low, so low. The shadows Conor had driven away gathered anew. “Those wretched Leinstermen.” She sat up and tugged a pelt around her chest, to hide from him the depth of her disappointment. “Why don’t you just let them steal a few head of cattle—”

  “No man will live to steal from me or mine.”

  This was Conor the king who spoke. There was no countering his words—she knew it even as she tried. “You said yourself that they were nothing but fleas.”

  “If I allow them to go unchecked, others will join them.”

  “So you’ll be going off again, and leaving me here, with Samhain Day only four nights hence?”

  “I’ll be back by then, wife.” He rubbed his callused thumb down the indentation of her spine. “My men wouldn’t take well to sleeping under the stars on the most magical night of the year. And I won’t waste the surging of the moon-dark tides.”

  His words did not cheer her. It would take no more than a winter storm to delay him, and then he would not be here to preside over Samhain. Aye, the Druids would have the ceremony, but she’d not be welcome, for even the Druids cast frightened glances her way. More importantly, without Conor, she could not announce the news, nor make her special request, as she had planned these past weeks.

  He rubbed a hollow at the base of her spine. “It was you who once told me that a king is more than a man.”

  She frowned at him. Aye, she remembered it. She had been talking about her father. She pushed the painful thought away because she did not want to think about her father. She’d only seen him once, from afar, during her whole stay in Morna.

  “You should know better than to use a woman’s own words against her.” She batted him with the end of the pelt, and then rose up from the bed. “Go off to your warring, then. I won’t be missing you, I won’t.”

  “And where do you think you’re going, wife?” Conor hefted himself on an elbow and reached for her. “I’ve only one night to make enough memories to fill the days to come—”

  “Never mind that.” She brusquely tossed her unbound hair over one shoulder and shimmied into her tunic. “There are two moorhens that’ll be boiled to bones if I don’t see to them, and I know by the rumbling of your stomach that you’ve another appetite to fill.”

  She passed beyond the partition before he could respond. She fumbled with tossing sticks beneath the dying fire. She was cursing the half-wit who hadn’t finished plucking the moorhens before dropping them into the pot, when Conor seized her from behind and whirled her to face him.

  She closed her eyes, but it was too late. The tears she’d struggled to control had trailed down her cheeks. How she hated these tears. How she hated the unpredictable flux of her emotions, how she hated to show Conor her weakness.

  “It’s more than my leaving that’s caused this.” His fists tightened around her arms. “Who hurt you, Brigid?”

  “No one,” she said. “No one who you’d want to hurt.”

  “I’ll kill him—”

  “Stop.” The truth swelled in her throat, until she had to bite her lip to keep it from leaping from her tongue. “Conor, don’t you understand? Are you completely blind?”

  “I’m not blind.” He seized her hand and twisted it palm up, tilting it so she could see her own calluses in the light. “I know that a single half-wit serves you as bondswoman, that Aidan’s fur rises when your name is spoken, that no footprints mark the mud before our door except mine. Three months you’ve endured their ignorance without tears. Now give me the name of the man or woman who caused them.”

  “How like a warrior to think you can battle away all sorrows—”

  �
�Brigid.”

  She took his hand and flattened it over her abdomen. “Here’s the man who’s causing these tears. Your son, Conor. He’ll be born on Beltane Day.”

  An odd silence engulfed the room in the moment after her blurted announcement. The fire crackled, the boiling water rumbled in the pot. His gaze fell to their joined hands. His pulse pounded beneath her grip, and warmth surged as he curled his fingers, ever so slightly, into the faint swell of her abdomen.

  “It was to be my New Year’s gift to you.” She released his wrist and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I was going to announce it before everyone at the Samhain ceremony. Now it’s all spoiled, all spoil—”

  Her words suffocated in the bulk of his shoulder. He drew her up, up, into the yielding warmth of his embrace.

  But this . . . this was not the iron-armed embrace she’d long grown used to, the choking hold she always had to squeal to be released from. This embrace was careful, controlled, self-conscious. It was a gentle pressure, the kind of touch a pup might expect from its mother’s jaws. She’d expected war cries of triumph, horns of mead raised to the sky, a new, arrogant swagger to his walk. But he gave her quiet, an unusual solemnity. She tilted her head back and met his gaze and saw a smile—boyish, almost bashful—tilt the corner of his lips.

  He said, “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as a woman can be.”

  “Has he quickened?”

  She shifted their joined hands to one side of her lower abdomen. “He feels like a butterfly fluttering within me.”

  “But he will grow strong.” He searched her eyes and the currents that always flowed between them surged. “You make a fool of me, Brigid. I have nothing to give you for Samhain but a gold torque and a handful of jewels.”

  There it lay, like a golden chalice before a thief, the opportunity she’d known would come. Guilt stabbed her, and she wondered anew if there were something not right in using her pregnancy as a means to an end.

  “I won’t be saying no to jewels, husband, but there is something else I’d like.”

  “Speak,” he said, his hand flexing over her, “and it is yours.”

  Her heart fluttered. For a moment she smelled the honeysuckle blooming in the woods, she felt the crispness of last year’s leaves beneath her feet, the kiss of the fresh wind on her cheeks and the loving warmth of the Sídh. A wave of homesickness overwhelmed her as she remembered her little hut in the woods. Then she stanched the hope, for Conor spoke without thinking.

  She said, “I would have this child born in Ulster. Or Tara. Or anywhere,” she added. “But I don’t want him born here.”

  She lowered her lashes. She did not want to see the disappointment on his face. She knew he’d expected her to ask some exotic rarity which he could acquire through wealth or travel or hard work. He had spent the past months building a strong ring-fort and all that went inside it: a feasting hall, animal pens, weapons’ sheds, and a strong-walled home just for the two of them. He had spent a season building a dream. Now, she wanted to leave it. She would suffer the isolation of living here, if she were to do it alone. But she would not have her son born in this place where hatred and suspicion and fear rumbled up from the very earth beneath them.

  His hand roamed her belly anew. “My son deserves to be born in the hall of kings.”

  Her eyes flew to his face. That odd, youthful smile still lingered on his lips. She felt again the wretched welling of tears.

  “Nay, no more of that.” He thumbed a tear off her cheek. “Had you asked for the club of the Dagdá, Brigid, I’d have torn away the veils between the worlds and wrestled it from the god’s hands myself.”

  “Oh, Conor, I’ve done nothing that I haven’t taken pleasure in myself.”

  “But you’ve given me more than a babe.” His chest swelled. “Tonight, you’ve made a man of me.”

  ***

  Brigid swept a polished stone over the linen draped on her lap to work the last lumps and ridges out of the weave. She hummed softly as she worked. Now and again her breath caught, as she remembered the delights of the past evening with Conor. But when the cold glare of mid-morning flooded over her, she squinted up to see her bondswoman across the room hesitating in the open doorway.

  “I’m glad you’ve come back.” Brigid had not seen the girl since yesterday, when Conor had ordered her and Aidan out of the room. “We’ve ten women’s work to do to prepare for the journey to Tara.”

  The linen slipped like fluid through her fingers as she swept it aside. A draft whirled in and chilled her ankles when she rose to her feet. “Come, come in, before you drain the heat from the room.”

  “The king . . . the king is here.”

  Brigid blinked at the girl. Conor certainly was not here. Brigid didn’t like to call a girl a half-wit, but there were times when she wondered. “The king left with his men before the break of dawn,” she said gently. “Now come, we’ve linens to launder.”

  Still the bondswoman didn’t move. She poked one finger into a burn hole in her tunic, and then glanced furtively over her shoulder.

  Brigid followed her gaze and noticed a silent, shadowy shape approach through the misty light. Then a long cane jutted out from the edge of the doorway and tapped the girl out of the way. The blinding sunlight lit upon a head of snow-white hair and gleamed on a form draped with golden ornaments.

  There was a moment, as she stared at the regal figure, when some practical part of her mind thought—ah, it’s King Flann of whom the girl speaks—and she felt nothing more than any woman would set upon suddenly with a guest of high birth, wondering if she had enough mead, or if she should slip beyond the partition and tend to her hair.

  Then her heart murmured against her will, Father.

  “With all my failing senses,” he said, his voice little more than a croak, “I feel the unwelcome wind which blows from you, child.”

  She flinched at the endearment, and then flushed with anger that he had the audacity to use it. Many times during the first weeks in Morna, she’d daydreamed about her father coming to her just like this. The daydream would always end with him pleading for forgiveness—and her falling before him in relieved reconciliation.

  Those dreams had died a long, hard death.

  He said, “The path to this ring-fort is steep and long.” The cane upon which he leaned trembled. “You’d not refuse a weary man but a few moments of rest by your fire?”

  “Of course not.” He’d made the request humbly enough, but it felt like a chiding. He was reminding her that though she was his abandoned daughter, above all she was a queen, Conor’s queen, and it was her duty to show hospitality to all who came to her door.

  He closed the flap behind him and worked his way toward the fire. He concentrated on the rushes as he planted his cane, took a few steps, and then planted his cane down anew. She had only seen him once, from afar, during her whole stay in Morna. She’d recognized the bushy head of white hair he’d had even seven years ago, she’d recognized the gleam of gold at his throat, wrists, neck, and in his hair, for Da had always decked himself in finery. Now, without the glare of morning light, she saw that though his clothes hadn’t changed, the figure bearing them had. Seven years had shriveled him like a dried apple. He creaked down into a heap by the fire, as if crushed beneath the weight of all the gem-encrusted ornaments of his position.

  She wondered how many splotches on his skin were due to the loss of Niall, how many weary creases were due to the usurpation of his power, how many to the forced exile of his wife and daughter.

  She snatched an empty horn from a peg on the wall. “I’ll bring you mead and some herbs to restore your strength, if you’re of a mind to take them.”

  “I’ll welcome them.” A few minutes later, he reached up to grasp the horn she thrust at him. His fingernails, in which he’d once taken so much pride, were cracked and cloudy. “It’s a terrible thing,” he murmured, noticing the direction of her gaze, “to grow withered and old.”

/>   “To be old and withered is no shame,” she countered, hardening her heart. “A long life is the gods’ greatest gift.”

  “Mayhap for some.” He bowed his head and contemplated the ripples of the golden honey-mead. His pate shone pink through his thin hair. “But all the bitter seeds a man has sown through the years come to harvest in his old age.”

  The bells on her girdle jingled as she turned away from him. “Sow no anger and you’ll reap no evil.”

  “I know I’ve brought upon myself the ravens that pick at my flesh, child.”

  She snatched her spindle whorl and scooped up the basketful of wool, then planted herself, straight-backed, on the bench near the wall, bracing herself for what her father might want of her, if not forgiveness.

  “I did what I thought I must during those terrible times,” he said. “A king cannot always be a father or a man.” He cupped the horn in his palms and stared into the liquid anew. “And not all of us can cast our eyes into the future and see what is best.”

  Her fingers paused at his subtle acknowledgement of her gift. But still no request for forgiveness coming from those cold, blue lips. “King Conor has gone warring to the east,” she said. “Whatever petition you wish to give him must wait until Samhain—”

  “You know it’s you I came to see.”

  The wool bunched and knotted between her pinched fingers. “Why now, after all this time?

  He waved vaguely. “Perhaps it’s best we don’t talk of the past. Of things that cannot be changed.”

  Things that cannot be changed.

  Brigid swayed as the years slid by her. For a moment she was a child again and her father sat cross-legged in the feasting hall, close to the hearth fire, the stones of his brooch glittering. She had snuck into the feasting hall while her mother nursed Niall, but she did not belong among these laughing men, the Druids in their pale cloaks of strange symbols, the lawmakers with their serious expressions. She hid in the shadows, watching, until someone found her and tried to usher her out. But her father caught sight of her and beckoned. Then he settled her in the folded wool of his cloak, absently brushing her red-gold curls.